Cutting the minimum wage is not the answer
Published: 29 July, 2009
Cutting the minimum wage is not the answer- Cllr Daren Lalor appeals to local businesses
Sinn Féin Buncrana Town Councilor, Daren Lalor has appealed to local businesses in the county not to support calls for a cut to the minimum wage. He said, "The minimum wage has played an important role in keeping Ireland's lowest paid workers out of the poverty trap". He was responding to calls from some business representative groups nationally.
Cllr Lalor said:
"While I fully understand that our small to medium businesses in Donegal and across the state are finding it difficult in the current economic climate, the knee jerk reaction by some within this sector in calling for a reduction of the minimum wage is wrong and lacks vision to see the bigger picture".
"The increase in the minimum wage was not a luxury but a necessity. It reflected the real cost of living for low-income workers. Slashing the wages of those on the minimum wage will not only have a profound impact on the affected workers but will do little to get us out of the recession. What the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) and the Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan know but will not admit is that Ireland's competitiveness has been held back by decades of under investment in critical infrastructure and services, an over reliance on Foreign Direct Investment, a failure to foster and development a widespread culture of innovation, and bloated senior management pay in the private and public sectors. Wage restraint needs to happen from the top down, not the bottom up. Addressing issues that affect the cost of business such as local authority water charges, commercial rates, and energy costs will increase our competitiveness far more than the knee jerk reaction of slashing those on the lowest wages.
Recently my party colleague Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and I locally launched Sinn Fein's document 'Getting Ireland Back to Work' with 80 proposals on jobs retention and jobs creation. Within this document it stresses the importance of sudsidising jobs under threat, setting up a body to actively pre-empt job losses, harmonising VAT across the island and ensuring business can access credit. These are just some of the 80 proposals that can achieve a competitive economy".
He concluded
"Cutting the minimum wage of €18,000 per annum would be a massively retrograde step and far from addressing the shortfalls in Irish competitiveness it would instead increase the numbers caught in the poverty net thus further burdening the public purse. Someone always had to pick up the tab and naturally representatives groups like IBEC and individuals like Colm McCarthy fight to ensure that the most privileged and well off in Irish society are protected. However government's role is to support and protect the interests of all Irish citizens equally."
ENDS
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